. . . THANK YOU . . .In his slow decision-making, Obama goes with head, not gut. . . President Obama meets with members of his administration in the Situation Room. The president has been criticized for taking a long time to decide on a strategy for the war in Afghanistan. (Pete Souza/the White House Via Associated Press) …By Joel Achenbach …Washington Post Staff Writer …Wednesday, November 25, 2009
President George W. Bush once boasted, “I’m not a textbook player, I’m a gut player.” The new tenant of the Oval Office takes a strikingly different approach. President Obama is almost defiantly deliberative, methodical and measured, even when critics accuse him of dithering. When describing his executive style, he goes into Spock mode, saying, “You’ve got to make decisions based on information and not emotions.”
Obama’s handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory.
The strategic review began in September. Again and again, the war council convened in the Situation Room. The president mulled an array of unappealing options. Next week, finally, he will tell the American public the outcome of all this strategizing.
“He’s establishing his decision-making process as being almost diametrically the opposite of the previous administration,” says Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s chief of staff. Wilkerson, who teaches national security decision-making at George Washington University, says the Bush-Cheney style was “cowboy-like, typical Texas, typical Wyoming, and extremely secretive.”
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE . . . On this THANKSGIVING DAY 2009 … I stand to give thanks that our current executive leadership is not cut from the Bush/Cheney mold of … “shoot first and ask questions later” … and that President Obama is capable of taking whatever heat we choose to heap on him for being contemplative as opposed to “trigger happy” …
… I invite “us” to consider not to shame, blame or criticize but rather simply ask … what would it look like when it’s fixed … and own that ONLY we have the power to bring about the change needed to fix it …
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